AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A DEBUT WRITER
6. WAITING August 2007: My publishers tell me the New York Times is going to review my book, and it’s tentatively slated for a date in September. I will lazily say that it is impossible to describe just how exciting that is, but it is also stressful, when there is a whole month to kill until the judgment. Suddenly, there is time. Time has a way of injecting herself into the picture when there is waiting to be done. I remember this from childhood Christmases, a holiday we should have never celebrated in the first place. But there we were, my brother and I, with lists in hand and our eyes glued to the small department-store plastic tree and its ribboned droppings. Time kept on and on, like the cheapest toilet paper. This time, though, because I am in it alone, the waiting is unbearable. It must be filled. I try yoga, massage, acupuncture, more therapy, but there is only one thing that does the trick. Crank calls. This is a truth, sadly. Even worse is this truth: I have a long history with this sort of thing. The first time was with K, my best friend growing up, in an elementary-school summer somewhere, when we got a wrong number trying to call our friend L. “But I am L. The boy L,” the older gentleman on the phone insisted, chuckling. “What is your name?”
We played along, memorized the misdialed numbers and called more and more, spinning more intricate and riskier little yarns. He claimed he was a retired firefighter who liked “perky ladies,” particularly our type, per our description: tall, leggy, blonde Playboy models. And we were certain the joke was on him. Somewhere around that time, I also crankcalled Kenya. I picked it for my country report and thought it would be special to interview a Kenyan. It blew my mind that there were people very different than American in the world. After all, my family, Iranian immigrants, were the different ones, from a different faraway place. How could there be a place where people would consider Iranians and Americans different? The globe with its many cultures seemed surreal to me, a kid who was lonely in school and at home, never quite an American, never quite an Iranian. I started reading National Geographic and once, after I was crushed by a photo of a tribal chief in a Stüssy cap holding a radio, I remember praying, Please, God, let these people still exist primitively when I get older and go visit them! With the help of a librarian, I figured out the country code and began furiously dialing random numbers. Eventually, I got someone. I was very disappointed when the voice said “hello.” In college, I went through a phase of calling my parents at odd hours and saying I was with the IRS or the FBI or CIA or the local police, whatever could get struggling immigrants on political asylum really going. The time difference was fascinating to me— for once, I could beat them to the day. I was good at doing voices and they weren’t used to hearing mine from far away, so it went quite well. When their
13 KHAKPOUR
The novel is out of my hands and in purgatory before entering the world. I love that phase: the middle of the road trip, someone else driving, seeing a world outside pass by, deftly escaping resignation to thoughts, assignment to words.